ESSAY BY OLGÁRIA MATOS

Amefrica addresses the imaginary foundation of a continent based on geology, or rather, based on the history of its inter-crossing with the history of Man, Brazil and Africa: the emblem of a common world and the very same humankind. Origin will be the backbone, archeology and genealogy will be looked at to decrypt the tension it holds, or else, to search for “core values" in the origin of those values: the geological and historical forming layers. In the homology and in the simultaneity of times, Nature´s and Man´s life is made up by the structuring of heterogeneous times.

From such perspective, Earth´s Gems play a critical role for present times awareness and critical eye: temporality tacitly questions time compression in dystopical and dyspoeticizing technological, scientific modernity.

The starting point for the creation of Amefrica was triggered by plastic artist Denise Milan´s research work on the roundish stones she names “Stone Eggs". From a multiplicity of stones Milan´s choice for “The Blue Stone Egg" was made because it is a unifier. It does not only bind two continents (America and Africa), but questions unstable, polymorphous identities (Nature, Culture). Milan´s work is a narrative which, while dislocating a “blue stone" in space and time (the present is made contemporary to its pre-history), it raises the notions of sacredness and profaneness, memory and oblivion, myth and history.

The Earth, named “The Big Blue Stone (Egg)" by Milan stands, among other gems, as the chosen one to be the icon of world´s everlasting creation process.

Brasília is the perfect illustration: an emblem, since for Denise Milan it condenses the modern and the archaic in the intersection, in the overlapping, and in the simultaneity of times.